Tuesday, January 17

A living, breathing document.

As we all know, one of the crap things about Britain's unwritten constitution is that various bits of the ruling class can make it up as they go along. "Oh, no," says the latest Home Secretary, invariably a bastard, "that's always been in there. I don't know what you mean. British Home Secretaries have had the right to throw your firstborn to hungry dogs since time immemorial. No, honestly. Just ask this expert from Oxford University who is one of only three people with access to a book written nine hundred years ago in Pig-Latin by a mad horseman and who definitely doesn't owe me any favours." Wouldn't it be lovely if we had a written constitution, saying things like "The Government shall never refuse a request to bugger off. We really mean it. No arguing." Oh, wouldn't it just?

Well, no. It'd be a start in the right direction, certainly, but, as our American friends will tell you, having stuff written down in plain and unambiguous language doesn't stop Home Secretaries and their ilk changing it on the fly. "The Constitution is a living, breathing document, which we must constantly reinterpret to take into account the realities of our modern age," saith the bastards. "When our founders (may they turn in their graves in peace) wrote that the government shall not infringe a citizen's right to bear arms so as to prevent tyranny, what they really meant was that the government should arm itself to the teeth and ban guns for the plebs. Oh, yes. And look here: a right to privacy! Well, I never. They really were awfully clever men, those founders of ours, writing in a right to privacy without even using the word 'privacy'. My, my. Oh, and 'privacy' means 'partially delivering a baby and then killing it', by the way."

A West El Paso man is suing his neighbors for $125,000 because he claims the dog barks nonstop. The pet's owners deny the allegations, but their lawyer says that if the dog was barking, it has a constitutional right to do so.

"I can assure you we are going to fight this case to the death. Take it all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court if necessary. I can honestly state that if the dog did bark at all, the dog was simply exercising his first amendment right to freedom of speech," said Monty Stevens, lawyer for the Alvarados.